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Meaningful Use Changes in Stage 2 – New EHR Software Requirements

MU Stage 2

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Initial analysis of the first few objectives can be found in this article.

80% of patient have blood pressure, height & weight recorded as structured data.

The recent changes to Meaningful Use Stage 1 require that blood pressure is recorded for patients 3 years old and older, and height and weight for all patients.

This is more of a stretch than the demographics requirement, but is again reasonable and attainable objective for the second stage of the MU initiative.

80% patient over 13 have smoking status recorded as structured data.

This is fairly straightforward, and as it’s required (at a lower threshhold) in stage 1, most EHRs wil have their reporting configured to be able to accurately capture this, and providers are likely collecting this already on many. 80% is a higher metric, but we see this objective as low hanging fruit, provided the forms and templates are accurately capturing this and reports are configured appropriately to show this.

Implement five Clinical Decision Support rules. Enable and Implement drug to drug and drug to allergy checks.

Now, we’re stepping up the requirements. Depending on the quality reporting your organization is submitting, you may not be reporting on compliance with these Clinical Decision Support rules, but at this stage they do need to be implemented to meet the objective. It is ideal to get a good idea of how these function and how they are build and adjusted, during the EMR evaluation process.

We envision CMS stepping up this requirement to a compliance level in Stage 3, but we’ll see what comes of this.

Drug/drug and drug/allergy checks are a logical feature to utilize once an EHR is deployed, and should be utilized for patient safety.

We will be posting further analysis shortly, including additional objective changes that will impact your organization.